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Palumbo-Liu elected next Faculty Senate chair

Senate also names three new members to advisory board.

By Kathleen J. Sullivan

L.A. Cicero

David Palumbo-Liu

David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature, was recently elected chair of the 46th Faculty Senate, which will convene at the start of the 2013-14 academic year. Currently, he is the senate's vice chair.

Palumbo-Liu, who earned a doctorate in comparative literature at the University of California-Berkeley in 1988, joined Stanford's faculty in 1990 as an assistant professor. He became a full professor in 2001.

Palumbo-Liu is most interested in issues regarding social theory, community, race and ethnicity, justice, globalization, ecology and the specific roles that literature and the humanities play in helping people address each of these areas.

His latest book is The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, published by Duke University Press in 2012.

Andrew Fire, a professor of pathology and of genetics, will serve as vice chair of next year's senate. In 2006, Fire shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Professor Craig Mello of the University of Massachusetts Medical School for discovering how double-stranded RNA can switch off genes.

Next year, Palumbo-Liu also will serve as chair of the senate's steering committee and Fire will serve as vice chair. The other six members of the committee are:

The senate also announced that three faculty members will join its seven-member advisory board, replacing members whose terms expire in 2013. The new members are Sylvia Yanagisako, professor of anthropology; Debra Satz, professor of ethics in society; and Lucy Shapiro, professor of developmental biology.